US military to use Alliance BioEnergy’s biofuel innovation

Alliance BioEnergy Plus, a US cellulose technology provider, has announced that its patented cellulose-to-sugar (CTS) process will be used to demonstrate the viability of advanced aviation biofuel and biodiesels for use in military applications. 

ALLM’s CTS process is poised to become the preferred, lowest cost producer of aviation biofuels and biodiesels (providing 99+% conversion efficiency, feed-stock flexibility, portable and module, yet upwardly scalable to refinery outputs) for conversion of biomass into sugar and/or phospholipids (bio-oil) for the production of biodiesel, bio-Jet and other biofuels to be used on land, sea and in the air by the military, commercial airlines and the transportation industries.

Biofuels are presently being produced; however, there are inherent drawbacks to the present methods of production which make them highly inefficient, expensive and in the case of the military, potentially hazardous to use ..... they are:

• Fixed, stationary land based and refinery sized production facilities
• Inefficient, expensive, old biomass-to-sugar technologies
• Inability to be scaled-down for local (Airport, Shipboard or Forward Operating Base {FOB}) production, use and support
• Inability to accept multiple feedstock sources w/o major process changes
• Require transportation for use anywhere beyond the production facility

According to the company, Alliance solves all of the above issues.

Military

In a statement, Alliance said that logistics are an issue in the military. In the Navy, fuel resupply ships (Fleet Replenishment Oilers such as the USNS Big Horn or USNS Henry J. Kaiser) are limited in the amount of diesel and jet fuel that they can carry during an at sea refueling deployment. When the supply is depleted, the ‘Oiler’ must return to a supply depot (generally in an unfriendly or hostile port) to take on a new supply of fuels and redeployment.

In a statement, Alliance said: “With the advent of the CTS process, the local production of Biofuels becomes a reality. The biofuel production facility is built into standard size, ocean going shipping containers. The biomass for conversion to Sugar and/or phospholipids is grown onboard in self-contained tanks using rapidly reproducing Micro-Organisms (such as Genetically Modified Algae or specialty plants) and fleet born cellulose based waste streams. To increase biofuel production, one simply adds additional container sized processing plants.”